Saturday, April 9, 2016

Teacher Discipline: Whose Interests Are Served by Hiding the “Bad Apples”?


A five month-long CBC-TV Marketplace investigation into “Teacher Misconduct” aired on April 8, 2016 —and it  confirmed much that we already know about the current state of the Canadian teaching profession. Fewer than 400 teachers have been dismissed over the past ten years, out of a teacher force that now exceeds 400,000 in our 10 provinces and 3 territories. Only 1.7 out of every 1,000 teachers was “weeded out” of the profession over the past ten years. That begs the fundamental question – who is really served by the current teaching profession regulation and discipline regime?

The CBC Marketplace National Report Card also revealed that teacher discipline decisions are often kept secret, can take years to resolve and that credentials are rarely revoked. In nine of the 13 educational jurisdictions, no information is publicly available, including past disciplinary measures. Even guilty findings are kept private across most of Canada by bodies responsible for keeping students safe.

The two major cases highlighted in the CBC Marketplace investigation are perfect examples of what happens and why in too many cases of serious teacher misconduct.  As a 12-year old girl, Carmen North and twenty other teen girls in Oakville, Ontario, were “tracked” on MSN by Mr. Gavin Bradford, a “cool teacher” with a sexually-charged  ‘food fetish.’ While he was removed from the school, it took five years to remove his teaching certificate, allowing him to teach for two more years in Scotland.

Eleven year-old Fredericton girl, Karley Merrill, was bullied by a mean woman teacher so much that she missed 41 days of school and had to be sent to the hospital during one particularly bad spell. Unable to get any response at the school level, her mother wrote directly to the New Brunswick Minister of Education. One day an official-sounding letter arrived stating only that the teacher had been disciplined for “Category 2: Misconduct.”  You can only imagine how upset the Merrill family was to discover, the next year, that the same teacher was doing it again at another school across town.  (more...)


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